Dr. Raul Leon is Assistant Vice Provost for Student Engagement and Scholarship Programs at the University of Wisconsin, where he leads a portfolio that includes some of the largest scholarship programs in the country offering opportunities to talented and diverse students that continue to be leaders locally and nationally.
Minutes after he posted a tweet accusing the Republican running in Wisconsin’s 3rd Congressional District of manufacturing outrage and failing to offer solutions, Eric Buxton received a reply from the candidate.
“Is that really your picture?” Derrick Van Orden publicly responded three minutes later. “So your real name is Eric Buxton?”
Van Orden then reshared the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Pharmacy professor’s July 13th post, asking Buxton for his home address, who he works for, who he’s contributed to and who he’s voted for. He threatened to publish the man’s public information unless he stopped his “Stalinist practices.”
Less than an hour later, Van Orden tweeted four screenshots of Buxton’s LinkedIn profile. “This you, hero?” Van Orden wrote for his thousands of Twitter followers to see.
Quoted: Adrian Treves, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, is wary of the state’s estimate.
Treves has questioned the DNR’s use of the model and fears the agency is overestimating the number of wolves. He noted the agency used data from surveys within 100-square-kilometer blocks to estimate the total area occupied by wolves. But, Treves said the state estimated average pack sizes based on their home range within 171-square-kilometer blocks.
“That means their grid cells are almost half of what a wolf pack territory is,” Treves said. “So, there’s a real risk that when they say two neighboring cells are occupied that they’re counting two packs where there’s only one.”
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Elections Research Center, said the spending dynamics are, in part, a result of Evers and Johnson being free from real primary challengers. For Michels and Barnes, Wisconsin’s August primary meant a later start to get their general election campaigns off the ground.
“The spending between incumbents and challengers might level out as election day approaches,” Burden said.
“It is striking that outside groups are spending more than the candidates themselves. Only Wisconsin residents get to decide who wins, but there is clearly tremendous interest from donors and party leaders across the country in what happens here.”
Quoted: But mobile markets can struggle to stay financially afloat. One researcher who has studied mobile markets for over a decade likens them to “revolving doors” because of how frequently mobile market projects start up and then stall.
“There’s often funding to start them,” said Lydia Zepeda, a University of Wisconsin-Madison professor. “The question is trying to find a model that is financially sustainable — because they’re expensive.”
Noted: Even before the pandemic, nearly 20% of adults in Wisconsin had mental health needs, according to the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. That percentage translated to about 830,000 people.
At about the same time — again, before the pandemic — a report by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute found significant coverage gaps across the state. The report said 55 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties had “significant shortages” of psychiatrists and 31 counties need more than two additional full-time psychiatrists to make up for the shortage.
On the other hand, some worry the mental health care workforce just isn’t there to support the spate of new patients who’ll test positive for anxiety disorders.
“I support it,” said Dr. Marcia Slattery, professor of psychiatry and pediatrics at University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of UW Anxiety Disorders Program. “Anxiety is the most prevalent psychiatric disorder and impacts life globally. The fact that it’s so widespread and there’s really been no coordinated effort to address it, I’m in support of what they’re proposing.”
Quoted: The phone number shakeup coincides with a regional population boom, said David Egan-Robertson, a demographer at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Applied Population Lab.
Demographers don’t typically focus on telephone area codes as units of study — they tend to be more interested in subdivisions used by the U.S. Census Bureau like political districts, Egan-Robertson said. Still, he noted, when an area grows, more residents and more businesses will probably need more phone numbers.
“When there’s a lot of population growth, there’s also a whole layer of commercial growth that may be going on,” he said.
In other words, when a region booms, the birth of a new area code could be one side effect.
For several decades, Wisconsin and a majority of the Midwest experienced a significant amount of brain drain to other states, depleting the number of highly educated individuals working and living in the state.
Enrollment at Wisconsin’s state universities fell by around 1 percent compared to last fall, according to new estimates from the University of Wisconsin System. While three schools saw more students enrolling this fall, nine reported declines of between 3 and 6 percent, and one reported steady enrollment.
For the second time in a year, a team of divers emerged on Thursday from Lake Mendota toting a remarkable piece of history.
Nestled in a corrugated plastic bed and floating on two rafts was a 3,000-year-old canoe — the oldest canoe to be discovered in the entire Great Lakes region by 1,000 years, Wisconsin Historical Society archaeologists said.
Quoted: Dr. Patricia Tellez-Giron, family medicine physician at UW Health, associate professor in the Department of Family Medicine at University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and Latino Health Council chair, has been practicing family medicine for 25 years. In that time, she’s been able to uniquely observe intergenerational care as her patients grow from infancy into new family systems as adults.
Tellez-Giron said it’s common, especially for Hispanic or Latino children, to be split between two cultures, which can feel like navigating two worlds simultaneously. This speaks to an absence in diverse counselors, Tellez-Giron said, and specifically, culturally competent counselors — that is, health care providers who understand and can uplift a client’s cultural identity.
“Often, the therapist does not understand our culture, why we are protective, how we all raise the kids together,” Tellez-Giron said. “And then (the therapists) tell the kids, ‘You have to be independent. You have to demand your independence.’ That creates, definitely, tension in the family.”
Quoted: Alexia Kulwiec, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers, said she would like to see the federal government return to providing tax incentives for employers who provide paid sick leave for people with long COVID.
Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, employers providing paid leave for up to two weeks to employees for COVID-19 could receive reimbursements in the form of tax credits, but the program ended in March 2021.
“It’s very disheartening to see that the policies that came out during COVID have essentially been reversed and undone, so they’re not there to protect employees today,” Kulwiec said.
Wisconsin Watch is joining a nationwide project led by University of Wisconsin-Madison researchers that aims to protect democracy by limiting the spread and impact of misinformation.
With a newly announced $5 million award from the National Science Foundation’s Convergence Accelerator program, researchers will continue development of Course Correct, a tool designed at the UW-Madison School of Journalism and Mass Communication to help journalists identify and combat misinformation online.
Before the legendary Vel Phillips accomplished her many firsts in the City of Milwaukee and Wisconsin, there was Mabel Emily Watson Raimey.
Raimey was the first African American woman to graduate from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She earned a B.A. in English in 1918 and was the first African American woman to attend Marquette University Law School. There is a marker at 11th and Wisconsin honoring her.
Quoted: “There’s a really diminishing number of people who are eligible for parole,” said Walter Dickey, an emeritus professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who led the state’s corrections department from 1983 until 1987. “And most of them have been in prison for a very long time.”
Danielle Yancey will moderate a panel titled “Lasting Impacts: How the Pandemic has Amplified our Health Inequities” on Tuesday, October 11, the second day of the 2022 Wisconsin Leadership Summit.
Danielle Yancey (Menominee/Santee) has worked in public service for nearly twenty years focusing on programs that promote social justice, education access, and equity. Currently, she serves as the director for the Native American Center for Health Professions at the School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Danielle grew up on the Menominee Indian reservation in north central Wisconsin. She is an alumna of the University of Wisconsin-Madison with undergraduate degrees in women’s studies and social welfare, Master of Science in urban and regional planning, and holds a sustainability leadership graduate certificate from Edgewood College.
Quoted: Alexia Kulwiec, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School for Workers, said she would like to see the federal government return to providing tax incentives for employers who provide paid sick leave for people with Long COVID.
Under the Families First Coronavirus Response Act, employers providing paid leave for up to two weeks to employees for COVID-19 could receive reimbursements in the form of tax credits, but the program ended in March 2021.
“It’s very disheartening to see that the policies that came out during COVID have essentially been reversed and undone, so they’re not there to protect employees today,” Kulwiec said.
Noted: Danielle Nabak is the healthy communities coordinator for the University of Wisconsin Extension Milwaukee County’s FoodWIse program. Like some other experts, she prefers the term food apartheid to food deserts because of histories including redlining, economic disinvestment and freeway expansions that isolated marginalized communities.
“I think that really gets at more of the active disinvestment and the active oppression that occurred to create the conditions that we’re really talking about when we talk about a food desert,” Nabak said.
Quoted: You should be concerned about your data privacy in general, especially when seeking an abortion, said Dorothea Salo, a professor who specializes in information security and privacy at the Information School of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Be especially wary of most commercial search engines, she said.
“We know they collect and retain search data, including search queries; we know they associate that data with individual searchers; we know they share, aggregate and sell it all over creation; we know that law enforcement agencies access it,” said Salo, who uses DuckDuckGo but notes that other search engines provide similar benefits.
A proposed settlement that would avert a nurses’ strike at one of Wisconsin’s largest hospitals was reached Sunday by the negotiating teams for UW Nurses United and UW Health hospital officials in Madison.
Quoted: Maxine McKinney de Royston, an associate professor in the Department of Curriculum Instruction at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that tests were constructed as part of a system that has failed students of color. She also said tests aren’t completely predictive of future success.
“We use these tests to say, ‘Oh, now we’re in crisis,’ as opposed to saying, ‘Well, are we actually evaluating or assessing that which is important to us? Are we actually evaluating learning?” McKinney de Royston said.
With a potential strike of hundreds of UW Health nurses looming, Attorney General Josh Kaul said Wednesday he is hopeful hospital management will recognize the health care workers’ union.
Quoted: According to University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of political science Barry Burden, Republican voters in the state can be quite receptive to candidates who share Trump’s politics, but they do not always vote for such candidates when they don’t explicitly reference him.
“In races where the former president did not make an explicit endorsement such as the contest for attorney general, the ‘trumpier’ did not prevail,” Burden said.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center, detailed shifting racial demography and white suburban backlash to the Trump era as central elements to the increasingly leftward tilt of what was once a bastion of Wisconsin conservatism.
“I think the population has changed over time, and that’s has made them (the Milwaukee suburbs) more politically competitive,” Burden said ” There’s also some evidence that white suburban voters became disenchanted with Donald Trump as a Republican candidate. Voters who normally would automatically vote for the Republican candidate for president were not comfortable with Trump.”
Noted: Loudenbeck graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and previously worked as a chamber of commerce executive, environmental project manager, supervisor in her hometown of Clinton and firefighter before working in the Legislature.
The Latino community is the fastest-growing segment of the population in Wisconsin, but the number of physicians from that community has been declining nationwide over the past 30 years. Fewer than five percent of physicians in the US identify as Hispanic or Latino.
“We know in medicine that if you see a physician that looks like you, that understands culturally where you’re coming from, the health outcomes are better,” UW Health family physician Dr. Patricia Tellez-Girón told Madison365. “But we need to start growing our own because we don’t see that the society at large is really aiming for that.”
The report analyzed data from the Wisconsin Retirement System, which covers most state and local government employees — including teachers, police officers, prison guards and university employees.
WRS data doesn’t cover every public employee in the state, but it includes more than 660,000 active and retired police officers, prison guards, teachers and university employees across more than 1,500 state agencies and local governments. Wisconsin Policy Forum also tabulated similar data from pension systems for the city of Milwaukee and Milwaukee County public employees.
This week, UW System President Jay Rothman announced the Wisconsin Tuition Promise, a new initiative to ensure underserved Wisconsin students can attend any university in the system tuition-free.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents is considering direct admissions for some of its campuses in an attempt to reverse enrollment declines, Wisconsin Public Radio reported.
Historically, 32 percent of high school grads from the state of Wisconsin have enrolled at one of the system’s campuses immediately after graduation. That dropped to about 27 percent in 2020.
The University of Wisconsin System is considering automatically admitting high school graduates to its campuses in hopes of stemming enrollment declines and boosting college access.
Under the new Wisconsin Tuition Promise starting next fall, in-state students from low income families will be able to attend any school in the University of Wisconsin System for free.
The program, announced this week, will waive the costs of tuition and fees that remain after receiving financial aid for UW System students whose household incomes are less than $62,000 per year.
The University of Wisconsin System is seeking $262.6 million in additional state funding in its two-year budget request and plans to use the bulk of that to boost employee pay by 8 percent by 2025. Regents passed the proposal unanimously even as some expressed concern that it could be a tough sell with Republican state lawmakers who increased the system’s base funding by $16.6 million last year.
Imagine all public high school students receiving a letter informing them of acceptance to a slate of Wisconsin universities in the fall of their senior year — without even submitting applications to those schools.
The University of Wisconsin System is considering the idea, known as direct admissions, as a way to simplify the complex college application process, foster a stronger college-going culture and boost enrollment at institutions struggling to fill seats.
Noted: The non-scientific survey the Ideas Lab has been conducting as part of its Main Street Agenda project has spotted a similar partisan breakdown, with Republicans far more likely to rank inflation and the state of the economy as their top concern heading into this fall’s midterm elections. The project is a collaboration between the USA TODAY NETWORK-Wisconsin, Wisconsin Public Radio and the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
In addition, the Odyssey Beyond Bars program expanded its English 100 college-credit course to four state prisons this past semester. The University of Wisconsin-Madison organization will add an intro to psychology class next year.
In collaboration with UW-Madison and four other campuses, the UW System will also soon offer incarcerated students a pathway to a bachelor’s degree through its Prison Education Initiative. Last December, the program received a $5.7 million grant from Gov. Tony Evers and the Wisconsin Economic Development Corp.
Some University of Wisconsin-System students from low-income families will have their tuition and fees waived under a new initiative announced by UW System President Jay Rothman.
The Wisconsin Tuition Promise will waive remaining costs not covered by financial aid for students from families with incomes below $62,000 per year beginning in fall of 2023.
At a Monday news conference on the UW-Milwaukee campus, UW officials framed the scholarship program as a “gamechanger” that will help more students graduate and ease the workforce shortage straining the state.
“We are in a war for talent,” UW System President Jay Rothman said. “We are not graduating enough people with four-year degrees and graduate degrees in order to help sustain the economic growth of the state. We hear that from employers all the time.”
Noted: Sabor said her PhD in Forest Ecology and Management from the University of Wisconsin-Madison would also help her make responsible decisions on the board.
Noted: That is why rather than skyrocketing, food insecurity rates remained largely unchanged during the pandemic, said Judi Bartfeld, project coordinator for the Wisconsin Food Security Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She said the “robust” federal response kept people fed, despite widespread unemployment.
Quoted: “The winner in this race will probably get in the 20s I’m guessing in terms of percentage of the vote, because it is so widely split,” said David Cannon, UW-Madison professor.
Quoted: Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of the Elections Research Center, said bringing the convention to Milwaukee is a strategic move by Republicans to take back the state.
“It has a lot of political value being in a key battleground state and in the Midwest, where there are other states up for grabs,” Burden said about the pick.
Quoted: “Given the importance of getting election administration right and the suspicion these candidates continue to express about the 2020 election, it is surprising that their plans for replacing the WEC are not more specific,” said Barry Burden, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center.
Interview with Diana Hess, dean of the University of Wisconsin–Madison School of Education and a Professor of Curriculum and Instruction.
As thousands of would-be attorneys anxiously await their scores after slogging through last week’s bar exam, law grads in Wisconsin are already beginning their careers as full-fledged attorneys, blithely unburdened by the need to pass a test.
The only state in the nation that still offers “diploma privilege,” Wisconsin allows people who graduated from either of the state’s two law schools — University of Wisconsin Law School or Marquette University Law School – to skip the bar, provided they successfully completed specific law school classes.
“And in the middle of his tenure as governor, there was a huge controversy because he actually pushed to change the language of the University of Wisconsin’s mission statement to take out the idea that the goal of the university is the search for truth.”
Quoted: “In the absence of any maternal illness, genetic abnormalities in the fetus — including those that would not allow the fetus to survive outside the womb — do not constitute a life-threatening condition for the mother,” Dr. Lisa Barroilhet, interim chair of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology, University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said in a written statement. “Because the abortion is not being performed to save of the life of the mother, it would not be legal in Wisconsin per the 1849 statute.”
Quoted: Steve Deller, ag economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said agriculture experienced the same supply chain issues that almost every industry faced in 2021.
“A lot of the stuff that farmers need to operate were in very low supply. So essentially it’s more expensive for farmers to operate,” Deller said. “It’s like any business. You know, I need to buy a new piece of equipment, but I can’t find it and prices go up.”
Noted: As absentee ballots are being cast across the state for Aug. 9 primary elections, Robert Yablon, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, recently joined Wisconsin Public Radio’s “Central Time.” He said leaving the voting rule debates unsettled amid an election is essentially asking for controversies.
Interview with Steve Deller, Professor, Agricultural and Applied Economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
We’ve never seen anything quite like this in our politics.
There have been bitter divisions in the past — the Civil War and Vietnam Era come to mind — but at no time in our history has politics been so fraught with anger, distrust and disinformation — and turbocharged by algorithms that reward fighting and conflict and discourage deliberation.
We need to find our way through this thicket, and I think it begins with encouraging thoughtful discussion.
That’s why we’re collaborating this year with the La Follette School of Public Affairs at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Wisconsin Public Radio on a project we’re calling Wisconsin’s Main Street Agenda.
University of Wisconsin Law Professor Keith Findley is a member of Madison’s Police Civilian Oversight Board. He says a plethora of research shows that women on the force have a positive impact on police departments and communities. He says they are often better at communicating and de-escalating tense situations.
Officials with the UW-Madison-based Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene and the Department of Justice’s crime lab — which do the vast majority of toxicology tests used in state prosecutions — acknowledge that they don’t have the equipment needed to distinguish between two isomers, or forms, of methamphetamine.
Quoted: “When we get that high community level CDC indicator, that’s when community-wide masking is really necessary,” said Ajay Sethi, a University of Wisconsin epidemiologist. Even at lower community levels of COVID-19, “people who are especially vulnerable to severe disease should always be wearing their mask indoors,” he added.
Noted: Before the pandemic hit, 1 in 12 Wisconsinites were food insecure — meaning they couldn’t or were uncertain they could get the food they needed. Food insecurity is linked to children struggling more in school, worse health outcomes in all age groups and greater stress on families, according to the Wisconsin Food Security Project at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Trump lost Wisconsin by about 21,000 votes in 2020. It was a key state to his re-election and one that he won in a historic victory in 2016 that a Republican hadn’t pulled off in decades. The state is key to any new run for president, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Wisconsin is one of the states where he falsely claims to have been robbed of victory, so the recent Supreme Court decision gives him yet another opportunity to explain why his loss wasn’t actually a loss,” Burden said.
“Nearly two years after an election that every judge and security expert deemed to be proper, Trump’s continual fixation has an air of desperation.”
Beyond Hunger, a new series by Wisconsin Watch produced by University of Wisconsin-Madison journalism students, will launch on July 21 with an evaluation of how pandemic-related programs alleviated a lot of hunger — and what it means for Wisconsin now that those support systems are fading.
Noted: Once regulations are changed, UW must provide its students with a method to learn abortion procedures out of state to remain an accredited by NACGME.
“While the OB-GYN residents previously had access to clinical training in abortion, that access is now significantly limited,” UW Health said in a statement. “It remains too soon to predict what options we will pursue, but we are focused on training OB-GYN physicians to provide the most comprehensive care possible.”
Quoted: Rob Yablon, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School who specializes in election and constitutional law, told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel earlier this year that there is no legal way for state lawmakers to decertify the 2020 election
“At this point, the bell cannot be unrung,” he said.
Howard Schweber, a UW-Madison political science and legal studies professor who is an expert in constitutional law, also said the fact that officials elected in 2020 have held office for more than a year “makes the whole thing even more preposterous.”
Wisconsinites have the weight of the nation’s problems on their minds heading into the 2022 midterm elections, a nod to a state whose voters might be pivotal to the balance of power in the U.S. Senate this fall.
That was a key finding of the La Follette Policy Poll, a written survey sent to 5,000 state residents last fall, which asked about the issues that matter to them most and the problems they most want solved. Nearly 1,600 responded.
“The main goal was taking a pulse on what are the policy topics Wisconsinites care about most with the hopes of steering our elected officials and candidates toward those topics,” said Susan Webb Yackee, a professor of public affairs and director of the La Follette School of Public Affairs at UW-Madison.
